


old souls

by witchfall



Series: upon an eternal wind [2]
Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: F/M, Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers, Fluff and Angst, Implied Sexual Content, Patch 5.3: Reflections in Crystal Spoilers, Post-Patch 5.3: Reflections in Crystal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-21
Updated: 2020-08-21
Packaged: 2021-03-07 03:00:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,431
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26019937
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/witchfall/pseuds/witchfall
Summary: When the act of wanting feels like a risk, what happens when you get everything you asked for?[technically, a sequel]
Relationships: G'raha Tia | Crystal Exarch/Warrior of Light, Scions of the Seventh Dawn & Warrior of Light (Final Fantasy XIV)
Series: upon an eternal wind [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1494161
Comments: 13
Kudos: 79





	old souls

**Author's Note:**

> *plays 5.3* wow i hope this doesn't awaken anything in me
> 
> This story is technically a sequel to my first g'raha/wol fic, 'hard is the heart that feels no fear.' But this can be enjoyed largely stand-alone, if that is your fancy. Izzie is a Seeker of the Sun miqo'te who was raised/adopted by lalafells.

For a blistering moment, Izzie sees meteors flicker in his crystal body.

He’s not there anymore. She knows that. She grips the crystalline vial of blood memories so hard she fears it will crack. The sadness Alisaie spoke of when she saw the star showers -- loss that leaves yawning gaps, writhing and vile -- creeps up her throat. She remembers when she had her first vision from Hydaelyn on that trip to Ul'dah long ago; she feels more grounded in it, now. The pain is lived in. Understood.

_The rains have ceased, but you are not here to see it._

The Scions join her at the seat of sacrifice. They stare at her, alarmed, as she strides past and says nothing. She will risk nothing sullying her hope; she will hold it like candle flame, close to her chest, until she is certain it will not go out.

* * *

Y’shtola lifts a single, elegant brow. “You still have to take the _Exarch_ to Nabaath Arang?” 

“Yes.” Izzie tries not to snap. Y’shtola, of all of them, is most likely to examine Izzie down to the quick and question what she finds there.

“Showing him the realm, are you?”

Izzie crosses her arms. Rain in the Greatwood has unsettled the ancient greenery. Her nose twitches at the heavy scent of damp moss. “What of it?” 

Something changes in the air, then. Y’shtola pauses, recalculating, and Izzie’s tail stands on end from the tension. “It simply has...been awhile, since you have taken a flight of fancy like this.”

Izzie digs her toe into the mud. She huffs. For a bard, she’s extraordinarily bad when it comes to talking about herself. “It’s nice. To pretend.”

_You are death._

“Pretend?”

“That I’m just a traveler, anymore.” 

Y’shtola gives her a small smile, but there’s something deeper there that spooks Izzie, like she’s looking at something private. “Is that not among your brightest qualities? Your penchant for adventure, vast and mundane?” She places a gentle hand on Izzie’s shoulder. “You are not so unknown.”

Izzie says nothing, even as Y’shtola shakes her lightly.

“I am not one to make prognostications I don’t fully believe in. You know this. I do, in fact, think this has more than a passing chance of working.”

Izzie nods. She refuses to cry.

“You could do worse." Y'shtola brushes an invisible piece of dirt off Izzie’s tunic, as if oblivious to the effect she had on her younger counterpart. "Though...were the two of you anyone else, I would call you both unspeakably obsessed..." 

Izzie's breath stutters as Y’shtola’s cloudy eyes sharpen upon her. She lets up for nothing. But before Izzie can struggle to defend herself, the woman gives a dazzling smile. 

“Do keep heart. My life and happiness depends on this working, too, you know."

Izzie glances pointedly to Runar, who is speaking with a woman by one of the Slitherbough gardens, and Y’shtola, perhaps sensing her intent through the aether, finally graces Izzie with silence.

* * *

The Scions’ crystals shimmer and everything clicks into its right place; Izzie feels settled for a bare moment, as if she had stepped onto a ferry in just the nick of time. Her beloved family rises one by one, greeting the new day, groaning as they stretch out waxy muscles. But as they each turn to appraise her, Izzie fidgets and fidgets.

They each gaze upon her expectantly. _We will leave the rest to you_ , Y’shtola says, smiling with rare maternal kindness. It sends cold water down Izzie’s back. Urianger’s softness has never been a mystery to her, even in his most shadowed; his words are complex but their meaning is simple. _It will work_ , he reminds her. The doors will unseal because G’raha’s blood is in her satchel. 

(How many years has she dreamed of saving his blood under her fingernails, of forcing those golden doors open with a furious pouring of her own essence?)

The realization scares her: they all know what she wants. And not a single person in the room dissuades her. 

Her stomach roils. Her blood feels electric. The hope of fulfillment alone may devour her. She runs and does not look back, not even when Tataru shouts. Not even when she feels Alisaie look after her strangely, like a confirmation that something is changed forever.

* * *

The ground shakes as those massive doors, the Dossal Gates, open. The stale air tastes split by lightning. She had just been standing before these same gates a few moments ago, but the difference between the worlds hollows her out. Unlike in the First, where the doors herald the hope of a city, these doors are dusty and hidden. Sealed purposefully against the various evils of mankind.

She grips the crystal tighter; perhaps it is his present soul that makes her own memories feel suddenly, painfully vibrant. His broad shoulders square as he seeks to leave her behind forever -- but then he turns just slightly, as if considering looking back, and his mouth moves as the doors close, the words lost forever to the sound of doors roaring shut. 

I love you. That’s what he said. She knows that now. The crystal is warm under her fingers, confirming it. It gives her the will to keep walking, up vaunted staircases that once stunned her with their beauty. Now they are just another obstacle. She barely registers the imperial stature of the architecture or the distant, yawning sounds of monsters that could still be lurking in its eternal spire. She follows a well-tread path to the Umbilicus and she knows it is right; the crystal near thrums with an affectionate, overbearing knowing.

So like him.

And then, after she throws one last door open with a breathless, heavy creak, her journey ends. She takes in a sharp breath. Dust stings her nose.

There he is.

He sleeps upon little more than a tiny dais with some red blankets thrown over it for bare comfort. His head lays upon what must be an old shirt of his balled up to serve as a pillow; his hands rest, open palmed, upon his chest. This cannot be what he thought an Allagan princeling would look like. She nearly laughs, lightheaded. 

Still...

Despite everything, his face is the picture of a lazy Mor Dhona afternoon. Even under the cold blue-gold light, his handsomeness is gutting. 

He is exactly as preserved in her memory, save his hair spreading loose like red vines across his makeshift bed. His youth, unburdened by a century of waiting, springs tears into her eyes. How many years does she bear on her back, despite the star merely going round twice? Will she look too different in his younger eyes? (This body is still older than her, she notes. But barely anymore. What a strange pair they make.)

She feels stupid, standing there staring with the crystal in her hands. She wonders if perhaps she should have brought Krile along. But, in theory, this should work the same as with the Scions, so before she can overthink it she places the crystal carefully, lovingly, beneath his palms. She jolts when she touches his skin — cold as the air in the tower — and for a moment she actually fears waking him, like she doesn’t want to upset his sleep. Even though that is exactly what she is doing.

What the fuck even is her life, a tiny part of her whispers.

The seconds drag on. Her tail twitches behind her in restless energy. Should she practice a speech or something? Should she talk to him to encourage his soul to accept itself? What words would even suffice? She spent two years wondering after him, yet it all feels short compared to this moment.

“I’m here,” she announces quietly and her hand lingers on his for just a moment. When he doesn’t respond, she sinks to the floor beside him, her back against his strangely warm dais-bed, her head between her knees. Words are no good. Whatever she says could easily be for naught.

She sings instead.

It’s a silly song the dragons taught her that does not translate well, but she liked the challenge of it in her mouth. It was once a courtship song, she was told. The meaning behind the deeply intricate symbols had been lost to time and the traversal of new stars. Now they just liked the ditty.

Care to forget the deep warm wells of another life?

The slow love of water beneath the sand?

Stupid questions I can't answer.

She hears the crackling sparkle of aether and pointedly does not look. She digs her eyes into her knees, seized with fear, and keeps singing, even though it’s muffled by her legs. Her torso is bent just enough that her voice feels weak, but she doesn’t adjust.

She will need to give him space. He will need time to come to terms with this world. She will not press him. She will not.

you're bold and bright, the sun star's last breath.

me?

at least the dark magic is mine

and I will keep it to myself this time.

Her song smothers the groaning sounds of his waking. She doesn’t notice him take a few silent moments to watch her, all curled up and heartbreakingly girlish again in her waiting. Her feet tap the floor. Her hands grip her ankles. Her ears twitch, and then…

She sees feet hit the floor in the corner of her eye and…

She shoots up to standing so fast that her vision tunnels for a moment. She doesn’t breathe. She could pass out standing there. She might well have, watching him as he watches her, his mouth popped slightly open…those red eyes...

She stumbles back a tiny step at the weight of seeing him. His breath catches. 

“I remember,” he says. His throat works to swallow. Her eyes hone in on it. “I remember everything.”

"Oh.” Breathe. Her heart is in her mouth. “That’s…”

Well, not entirely good, is it? Don’t think about it.

She scans him as clinically as she can manage. The Allagan technology did well by him, at least. His skin is clear and pale. His tattoos stand out like void bites. His lithe frame had retained its old musculature, though she imagines it must be disorienting regardless. His aether situation -- she would leave the specifics to Krile -- must be very confusing.

But then his eyes fill with tears.

She panics, and against her earlier desire for restraint, she closes the distance between them in a step. Her hands fly to his face (no crystal coming to claim him, simply the edge of an archon's tattoo...). She cups his jaw, resting her thumbs on his cheeks. The tears she can't catch fall into the webbing of her fingers.

"It's okay," she says softly. She squashes her own tears down, down, down. His face still feels too cool beneath her hands and she thinks for a moment about what it would be like to wrap him up in a scarf and keep him like a trophy. "The worst is over now."

He leans his mouth into her palm. When he speaks, his lips brush her heart lines and she fears she may combust. "You're real, aren't you?" he croaks out. Voice unused for years. "You aren't some strange ghost created out of the hope of two souls?" 

Her throat tightens. She forgets how to speak like someone kind. “Of course I’m real, you idiot. Of course I'm--”

He seizes her, then, in a crushing embrace, his arms as strong as the day they said goodbye. They snake around her waist. She is crushed between her leather armor and his stupid ugly tunic and the haleness of his body, and all she wants is to wink out of time and live in this moment. Still, a part of her resists. He has much to remember. Hundreds of years to consider.

He whispers into her ear. “My star. Izzie. My love.” Naming her, as if to anchor her to him. He pulls back only so their foreheads meet. She struggles to focus on the radiance of his gaze. “Are you alright?”

“Am I--” She nearly growls at him in her flummoxed state. Tears slip down her cheeks, too, and it makes her angry and proud and happy and destroyed. “I should be asking you that!”

Perhaps he didn’t hear her; but then, it is more likely he did and saw through her. He tucks her head under his chin and rocks her back and forth. He holds her tightly until her shoulders finally lose their tension and she gives a keening sob against his chest. His breath catches again. And then they collapse to the gold filigree floor, grappling with the sudden collision -- and end -- of too many painful years apart.

* * *

She feels a bit like a child bringing home a stray, even though that doesn’t make sense. Her Scions know him and he’d lived in Mor Dhona for a not insignificant amount of time. But nothing explains the bizarre embarrassment and desolation she feels when they arrive at the Rising Stones and everyone stares for a second. Don’t look, she wants to scream. Everything is fine and normal and not at all a miracle that shouldn’t have happened.

But then Krile marches forward and points a terrifying finger at G’raha. “ _Raha._ Just because this all worked out well does not mean you are forgiven for being an idealistic fool. To bed. Now.”

Izzie grins so brightly her eyes water as G’raha’s ears flatten against his head. Her mother would like Krile very much; the resemblance strikes her fiercely in that moment. 

“Don’t let him leave your sight, Izzie,” she grumbles as they enter Dawn’s Respite. G’raha leans into Izzie as she half carries him, and she wonders if he’s dramatizing a little to stay close to her _and_ hide from Krile. “I can’t believe how angry I still am with you after all these years. You ridiculous fool. You’re lucky your decision quite literally prevented a calamity…”

G’raha, to his credit, bows to her scolding. “You’re right, of course.”

Krile harrumphs. But Izzie doesn’t miss the soft, sidelong glance she gives the younger scholar before she near pushes him to bed.

* * *

Izzie brings G’raha everything Krile says he needs and more. She fetches food and blankets and washcloths. She holds weird aether scanning tools at just right angles. She cleans medical tools and sweeps floors and folds sheets when Krile runs out of things for her to do. At one point, she notices G’raha keeps brushing his bangs out of his eyes. She silently marches up to his bedside, fishes out a few pins from her pocket, and waves them in front of his face.

He reaches forward to take them. "Thank you--"

"Let me do it," she whispers, and before he can protest, her fingers brush against his crown, pinning his soft hair out of his beautiful eyes. He takes the faintest breath before he wraps a hand around her wrist, gentle and pleading.

"You haven't sat down."

She feels like she has hornets under her skin. "Lots to do."

He quirks a smile. “No there isn’t.”

She glances to where his fingers grip her. She glances around the spotless Respite. Her ears flatten. “...well. There _was_.”

So she sits in the chair Krile pointedly left beside him and collapses her body forward until her forehead lays on the mattress. She _is_ tired. Not for the first time, she wishes she wasn’t like this. Wishes she didn’t feel driven to _do_ until she can’t think anymore.

But then G’raha gently rubs her head between her ears and she decides she can just opt out of thinking, if she wants. She allows herself the affection; from the way his hands don’t leave her, he seems desperate to give it. She snaps out her own hand, letting it wander the mattress and muss away the sheets until she finds his thigh and she feels better, touching him back. He softly hums some old tune and she relaxes there in relative quiet for who knows how long.

In her warm drifting, she eventually realizes she dreads nightfall. She should let him sleep the recuperative sleep of a mortal man. She should not hover or oppress him into what she wants. But just as before, as in the old days and the new, he speaks as if he can read her like a book.

"If it isn't any trouble, my dear one," he starts, "would you be willing to stay with me tonight?"

She nods at once, relieved, and settles harder into her chair. He smiles, lopsided.

"You can have a bed, if you'd like."

"I want to be closer," she admits, and already her face burns, even though she has not lifted her hand from his thigh for hours, maybe. "So here is fine, I've slept in a chair before, a lot actually--"

He reaches up and tugs on one of the frazzled locks of hair framing her face, just like Before. Her lip quivers. "You can have _a bed_ ," he says, cutely commandeering in a way he never let himself be as Exarch, and he pats his mattress.

She blinks at him. In the next moment, she is peeling off her boots, avoiding his resplendent gaze as she does so. She pulls back his covers and slips in beside him, her legs sliding against his warm, bare skin as he tucks her in against his chest. She entwines their limbs and throws an arm over his waist. She digs her nose into his chest, smelling his clean skin; even now his scent reminds her of their old campfires. He rubs small circles into the back of her neck with his thumb.

Why had she been so afraid to ask for this?

"Finally," he sighs into her hair. "My dark and dastardly plans may commence."

He brushes his fingers on her exposed waist. She squeaks at his touch -- he was _tickling_ her, the fiend -- and whaps him with her palm. He laughs. She feels at home.

\--

* * *

G'raha awakens first. He blinks heavily at the weight lying against him and looks down, and only then does he accept he is not dreaming. 

Izzie snores against him, her mouth open. Her chin shines with drool. Her hair is a tangle of red knots under her sweaty neck, but her face is so relaxed that he thinks to keep her there, forever. His reverie only ends because Krile enters -- and she stops suddenly, seeing the pair.

He can only describe her expression as wistful. But she schools her face into more familiar, sly watchfulness when she notices his gaze upon her.

"You _would_ ensnare the warrior of light," Krile says, as if exhausted of him already.

"I assure you," he says, quiet as a whisper, "that it was entirely the other way around."

Krile smirks. She oozes sarcasm as she sweeps over to them, but when her gaze shifts to Izzie’s still miraculously sleeping form, he remembers how badly he missed Krile’s softness, too. 

“Oh, Raha.” She lays the back of her hand on Izzie’s forehead, testing for fever (it was apparently that unusual for her to sleep like this), but her twinkling eyes land on him. “You haven’t changed at all.”

* * *

And then the strangest thing of all happens: The Scions of the Seventh Dawn have nothing to do. Nothing so pressing the world won’t wait a few days for them to catch up to it.

G’raha learns the limits of his new old body. He falls asleep on their picnic blanket and during a card game and even, to Izzie's sickening panic, once on the edge of a balcony wall where he had perched with a book. He devours whole meals so quickly she watches him in careful awe. He weaves spells and gets tired enough to faint; she has so far been able to catch him before he hits the ground, but she ponders letting him do so, once, if it teaches him a lesson.

Izzie enjoys playing witness. It’s like watching her favorite dreams depicted on stage for her amusement.

"I like your hair like that," she says in passing one day. His hand flutters up to the pins he had kept and his ears flick -- more expressive than she had ever seen, even in the old days. He smiles brightly.

"I'm glad," he says. "I like it too."

Tataru gifts him new clothes, and that is when it truly feels like the beginning of an era. He steps out of a side room to model them for the Scion family, smiling sheepishly, and Izzie stares for a moment too long. She feels Feo Ul's hand in this. The Fae King reached through time and space to design this outfit specifically to slap her in the face. _My dear sapling will have to thank me in person later!_ She can nearly hear the words -- and indeed, Izzie would.

The design is a perfect blend of old and new. His sharp red half-robe is ridiculously _him_ , honoring the Exarch and young scholar both. The gold accents shimmer under the light. He is adorned with so many necklaces she is struck with the desire to bring him another, as if in tribute. 

She steps close and adjusts his black scarf, letting her fingers drift down to the tassles and linger on the sumptuous fabric just over his collarbones, before she realizes what she is doing. 

G'raha's grin is blinding in the corner of her eye. 

"It wasn't even," she grumbles at him.

"And the rest of it?"

"It's a good look," Thancred says. His tone indicates more than just the clothes. Alphinaud poorly stifles a giggle.

Izzie turns back to glare at them, but they are all _looking_ at her, like she is the twist in the tale they've been waiting for. Urianger smiles gently. Y'shtola raises a brow. _I knew it to be so._ Even Alisaie looks strangely triumphant, like she'd won a bet.

She blushes furiously and lets it slide.

Despite this -- despite the offer for him to join the Scions and the work he does to re-seal the tower _and_ the fact he is never far from arm's reach, much less out of sight -- she still feels out of sorts. And then one day, as they sit together in the Rising Stones cafe picking over finger sandwiches, her mouth does the thing where it asks a stupid question before she realizes it's happening. 

She stares at him as he places a fifth sandwich in his mouth and she asks: "Are we together?"

He glances to her, alarmed, but his tone remains steady and teasing. "Did you teleport somewhere on accident? You look corporeal enough."

"No. I mean. Are we...are…" Well, no, now it feels really stupid. She turns away. She stuffs a whole sandwich in her mouth in one go, and he waits patiently the whole time. She says, once she swallows the food down: "Is this happening? For real this time?"

She isn't sure what she means. Physically? A proposal of marriage? All of it makes her feel like she just stuck her head in an oven.

His brows turn downward. "Why wouldn't it be, my love?"

Yes, this is very stupid indeed. His love is near impossible to avoid. But since he received his own room at the Stones, they function otherwise like they intend to live completely separate lives. Like colleagues.

Which they are. Which is fine.

It’s not.

"Can we...go on a trip? An adventure maybe? Or something? Alone. Just us two. Without...any of the other Scions…?”

She bites her lip and lays her head on the table and covers her scalp with her hands. She wants to die for some reason. 

He laughs, warm and true, and he leans in until his forehead rests on her temple. She still hides in shame, even as he whispers just for her to hear. "How many times do I have to tell you you're my guiding star? Before you believe me?"

Her face is so flushed she feels sweat break on her brow. "Maybe another time would help," she mutters into the table.

He laughs again and gently kisses her on the corner of her mouth. "I will wait for you to come to me, alright?" When she looks at him with wide eyes, stricken by a terror she struggles to name, he smiles at her. Love freely given. "You could never disappoint me. As ever, I follow in your light."

* * *

She takes him up on it that night.

She was never confident in these affairs. Their first time in the tower on the First she was seized by reckless abandon. He was already seeing everything. Why hide? Their time, she sensed, had been limited once again. The tower loomed over everything. A judge in cold absentia.

Now, if she knocks on this door in the Rising Stones, she will be stepping into forever. Her body shakes. She feels 19 again, afraid of how powerfully certain she is -- afraid of the pain she may invite into her life, if she loses him. But this time, she has already lost him twice. No god, if they exist, would be cruel or stupid enough to make an enemy of her this time.

She knocks. He opens the door. He stares, bewildered. 

"Hi," she says flatly.

A blinding smile lights his face. She has to look away a moment. Her heart thuds so strongly she is certain he can hear it. He stands there, staring.

"Move, would you?" Her voice feels harsh and unsteady. "Before the gossipmongers see."

He steps back. She steps in. And then, in one fluid movement, he pulls her against him and pushes the door closed behind her. Suddenly her back is pressed against the harsh wood and she is kissing him, melting into his muscled chest and his moan of satisfaction as her tongue darts into his mouth. She isn't sure who moved first. It doesn't matter now. They're together, against the literal forces of time and space. 

She pulls back just enough that their lips are only a hair apart. Heat thrums between them.

"I hope you know," she breathes, "that this time I mean to keep you."

He grins. The boy she had dreamed of. "This time I intend to be kept."

She laughs before he quiets her with his mouth against hers. 

For all its drama, the reconnection is quiet. He carries her to the bed. They undress each other slowly, limbs entangled, smiling into each other's skin, until they lay together naked beneath the blankets. He won't stop kissing her, pressing his lips against old injuries, her ears, her collarbones, her stomach. 

“So much to catch up on,” he says. “And I will know all of it, again.”

She takes a deep breath and shreds her last bit of armor. _Do what you like with me_. _Mark me. Make it real._

He holds her fast when she says this. He trembles, looming over her, within her. She wants to be disappeared by his shadow. She wants to be consumed.

His mouth and tongue slide down her neck. "You are _everything_.” His teeth graze the top of her shoulder. “I will answer your every prayer.” His hand slides over the bony curve of her hip. “For what I want...is to see you _beloved_.”

* * *

And yet.

She wakes curled into his side, his arm circled around her shoulders. She moves until she can hear his heart, beating and alive. 

The shadow of night sparks cruel questions: Will he be kept? Will he be fighting fate's designs upon his life? Can she survive another loss? Can she afford to try? They circle in her head until she takes a sharp breath. She utters his true name. "Raha…"

Perhaps he had already been awake. Immediately, he circles his arms around her in a protective vice. “What’s wrong?”

Her voice catches in her throat and G’raha pulls her up. He sits against the headboard and cradles her against him, bringing the blankets up to keep her warm. “I don’t know,” she says. She smothers her ear against his chest. Lets the sound of his lifeblood calm her. “I don’t know what happens next.”

He strokes her back. Her fingertips slip against his chest as she balls her hands into fists. And then he sucks in a breath. She tilts her head up at him.

"...I just want you to know where I stand," he says, and she gets the feeling he has practiced this speech. "I...I had seen the reports of your death in the future that now will never be. I saw...memorials to you in every camp. Every small group carried something of you. A picture. A carving. A song they thought you wrote…"

He sighs. She hears a century of pain in it.

"Your death in the abstract was untenable. You were _everywhere_. And...I knew, I _knew_ when I woke that I would be confronted with your death, even in an ideal world. But it was...I felt so immeasurably stupid. To think that I would be able to survive it. I could barely tolerate giving up adventuring with you, much less..."

She stops him with a finger to his lips. No need to relive these hurts for her sake. "What's the short version, Raha?"

The use of his true name sends another contented shudder through his lungs. He takes her raised hand and pulls until he can press his lips against the inside of her wrist.

"I had a century to come to terms with what I want. And now I have her, despite my every expectation.” His tail curls around her hip. "You haven't had that time. I didn't want to press it. But I also know...sometimes you experience more pain doing nothing out of fear of what the something will bring."

She hears the silent mercy he is granting her. _It’s okay to want. It’s okay to struggle with it._

“And,” he adds, “you lose a shocking amount of time, thinking not of the present.”

He presses a kiss to the pulsing vein in her wrist. She taps his chest with her thumb.

"What did the pictures even look like?"

His other hand slides lazily down her back. "Not even the slightest bit like you."

"Not even a little?"

"It was you if you were at least a fulm taller and had much meaner brows. Maybe."

"Hmm…"

He squeezes the base of her tail and she jumps. His chuckling breath tickles her ear. "I much prefer this version."

* * *

G’raha taps the charcoal against the blank drawing parchment as he watches Izzie experience the consequences of her actions. 

On the path into Rowena’s Splendors below, the Warrior of Light and Darkness hummed, fully distracted by the contents of her bag while she walked -- leaving her utterly unprepared for Thancred to hold out his arm and nearly clothesline her. She stumbles with incredible drama. Her arms flap. Her feet dance to keep her aloft, and just barely do they succeed.

“Hey!” she shouts.

“Your bag,” Thancred insists.

“You-”

“ _Your bag._ ”

Izzie growls in frustration before shoving it at him with a leathery thunk.

Thancred makes a show of rifling through it. Some knives wrapped in burlap. The remnants of a cheesecloth. A few glamour prisms. G’raha knows Thancred wouldn’t find anything in there. He knows, also, that Thancred wouldn’t even be down there if it wasn’t for him. He tipped the man off because he knew Izzie would find it funny.

He rather enjoys Izzie’s little cons -- when they aren’t directed at him. 

Thancred hands back the satchel. “If I find any more of that Mord grub in our coldbox, I will confine you to quarters, warrior of two worlds or no.” Despite his words, his tone is largely...endeared. Relieved, and not just because her bag was empty.

Izzie grins at him. “Gaia didn’t send any with me this time.”

Thancred ignores her. “And you!” he shouts up at G’raha. “Stop enabling her!”

G’raha raises his hands to proclaim innocence, laughing, and he wipes off the charcoal lingering on his fingers. He turns his eyes toward the door to the balcony upon which he sits. His heart floats, knowing it’ll be mere moments before Izzie will be ambushing him.

The scions -- _his fellow scions_ \-- hadn’t missed the changes within her. She smiles more. She even plays music in the tavern sometimes, which always brings a full house. _I’ll deal with the frustrating practical jokes if it means she’s doing alright_ , Thancred admitted to him over beer not so long ago.

He hears her before he sees her, but only because he seeks out her quiet footfalls. She jumps from the threshold of the door and makes it half-way; she twirl-steps the last half to dramatically throw her arm over his shoulders. She lands hard enough to thump the air out of him. The whole of her leans playfully into his side, her chest nearly against his own. “Ready to see Ma?”

He grins before her happy radiance, never one to resist her call to adventure -- not even when he fears what it will bring. Meeting her adoptive mother, for instance. He settles his arm around her lower back. “As ready as one can be.”

* * *

The Thanalan heat stifles him. Dust seeps into his clothes and sand flies into his eyes no matter which way he turns when the winds blow across the desert. Izzie's ma, Sheshena Shena, takes one look at G’raha’s pale, wind-chapped skin and insists he take tea with her on the covered porch.

"Izzie can set up the carriage herself," she declares. Izzie glances to him and nods encouragement, but she acquiesces at once to her Ma's will. Lady Shena, G'raha thinks, has a power all of Garlemald wishes it could wield.

But he knows that this gesture is not solely for his benefit. She allows him a few moments of polite, worthless conversation over an aromatic chai before her glassy eyes pin him in place.

"Not too many moons ago," Sheshena says, "I was going to ask her to quit."

G'raha lets that register for a moment. "Her work with the Scions?"

Sheshena inclines her head. "She wouldn't have. She can no less quit being the warrior of light than I can quit being her mother. But I thought...perhaps it would help her notice just how bad the misery weighed on her shoulders."

She purses her lips and turns away, toward Izzie. She lingers there a moment. 

"She would have just been angry with me." Her gaze slides back to him. "But I have watched my daughter carefully, G'raha Tia. And much of this started not long after you disappeared from her life."

He understands now. She is warning him. She is telling him the stories that wouldn't be in any tomes.

"...it wasn't all your fault," she allows. "Her time in Ishgard would have crushed her were it not for dear Edmont." He forgets she is on first name terms with Izzie's Ishgardian family -- that she is part of it, too. "And then her father died."

G'raha closes his eyes, punched in the gut. 

Her voice hollows. "It never quite stopped after that."

He realizes this is not just a tribunal for his crimes against her daughter, but a confessional. An unmooring of pain, old and new. 

"She stopped allowing herself things. Her silly songs ended. Her visits slowed. I knew she needed the space. But she was drifting into the middle of a lake with no paddle. She was letting it happen." Her silver eyes sharpen into knives. "And I sought to blame someone. And I decided it was you. You, who had broken her heart first. You, who had left her behind. You were...it was easier."

She sets down her tea cup with a shaky clink and turns away from him.

"She told me what happened on this...other world. How she found you again."

He stares down into his half-sipped tea. His fingers slip upon the stone table. He would take this punishment. It was small, in the scheme of things, and necessary.

"She told me, had it not happened...had you made a different choice, that she would be dead."

So would the whole world, he thinks to say, but on this he and Sheshena agreed: without her, none of it matters, anyway.

"That you survived years and years to set things right and make sure she didn't die."

He nods, though his neck feels stiff.

"So I wanted to apologize. And thank you."

His heart stutters. He looks up at her in shock.

"Come off it," she says, sly and perhaps embarrassed. "Look at her. _Look_ at her." Her lip trembles. "She's humming again."

They both look out to her, softly brushing her chocobo. The 'bo chirps conversationally at her. She laughs and coos at her stalwart friend. And there, in her laughter…

Where the desert sun left him weak and wan, she is painted in one thousand colors of light. Her sea green eyes shine. Her skin reddens like a canyon at noon. The sun adores her as its own, and perhaps she is. 

_This is the crystal of Azem. I think that it was meant for me. Can you believe it? Emet-selch, making this for me, once upon a time..._

_The Sun. The Shepherd of the Stars. When he touched the crystal, he felt a strange sort of awe._

He tastes cloves and the fruit of oasis when he thinks about her aether whipping around him. He thinks of life where there should be misery -- of how desire can twist but also carefully caress.

"Ma! Where'd you put Bonbon's sun hat?"

Sheshena answers, her voice no longer weighed down, and he realizes again why Izzie was so afraid at first. He would learn the realness of her again. He would see her pain and be there at her Da’s grave with her. He would make it impossible for her to forget that she is loved. 

Sheshena turns back to him and the light in her eyes shifts. 

"So." Sheshena regards him regally. "You're Allagan royalty, are you?" She raises a single brow to his flummoxed expression and sighs as she lifts her tea cup to her lips. "I suppose she could do worse."

The sun scalds bright pictures behind his eyelids as he laughs.

**Author's Note:**

> song/poem she sings is something I wrote and never used for anything because its random as shit! glad it finally got some use!
> 
> thank you to @masqvia for beta-ing!  
> 


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